Personal computer (PC) health includes a variety of features that gauge the reliability and safety of computer system resources including data, programs, and hardware. Examples of PC health features include security, privacy, virus protection, backup of programs and data, etc. Each of these features is typically administered, if at all, by a different PC health status provider. Thus, maintaining good PC health status requires a high degree of knowledge and attention by users to the various sources of the status information. If either is lacking, then there is a substantial likelihood that the user will be unaware when the computer system's health is poor. As a consequence, the data and programs of many individuals' computer systems are vulnerable to viruses, intrusions on privacy, data loss, etc. In view of the value and sensitivity of data and programs maintained on most users' computers (e.g., digital photo albums, music libraries, computer games, business software, etc.), the potential severity of loss is substantial.
The complexity of personal computer systems and their variety of uses has rendered the task of administering the operational health of such systems beyond the capabilities of the vast majority of users. In order to fully administer the health of a PC, a user must have an awareness of the needs of the PC with regard to a number of features/aspects of PC operation that contribute to overall PC health. However, due to the monumental nature of the task of administering PC health, most users do not adequately address this task until their failure to maintain a computer system's health leads to some form of catastrophic event such as a virus attack or theft of private information.
Previous attempts to address PC health have taken a limited, focused approach to monitoring and administering the issue of health of a computing system. In particular, individual applications tend to focus upon a particular feature, such as security, anti-virus protection, privacy, backups, etc. Such systems take an approach of focusing upon individual features and notifying users of the status of such features in isolation. A known security index rendering user interface provides a “Security Index” based upon a set of input sub-indexes including: antivirus, antihacker, antiabuse, and antispam. The interface also provides a “Service Status” menu identifying enabled and disabled features. The user interface, including links to a store for providing products that concern the components of the security index, suggests that this is a marketing tool for the products of a particular seller of software.